Person-Centred Therapy Articles

Trust is such an important part of therapy. And, of course, of life…

So do you trust yourself?

To know yourself.
To grow yourself.
To heal.

A gentleman born in the early 1900’s trusted you, even though you’ve never met. His name was Carl Rogers, and he was a psychologist. And he believed that you – that all of us – have the innate power to understand and heal ourselves. He believed that somewhere inside, you have the solution, the answer, the salve for your life’s struggles. And that trust will help unlock them.

So how do you do that?

I was wandering around some neighbourhood streets recently, when I came across these two cat-friends in the gutter, just hanging out together.

They reminded me of all those sayings about friends being the ones who’ll walk into a place with you when everyone else walks out… That friends are the people who’ll meet you where you are… maybe even share part of the journey ahead with you (even if that happens to be down in a gutter of some sort just now).

Interestingly, there are also some parallels to counselling here, too…

This photo was taken several years ago, and it’s always had a haunting quality about it for me. For having taken a stance many decades before, and not having the chance to change its position, this statue is gradually being overgrown. Subsumed. Lost.

It’s like some kind of fable, warning about what can happen if you stand still for too long…

And it reminds me of the many other ways we can perhaps stand too still or take a particular stance and refuse to change our position sometimes – intellectually, politically, emotionally, relationally.

The lure of becoming an ‘expert’ seems to fit here, too. You know the stuff I mean: inhabiting only a very small, very known (and very safe) part of our particular universe. Not exposing ourselves quite so much to the vulnerability of change or newness. Feeling we have more answers than questions; more facts than curiosity. Perhaps thinking that a certain way of doing things is the best one, or maybe even the only one – and that that one way just happens to be our own… (how handy).

Do you sometimes find yourself stuck in stuff like this? Caught in the vines that have grown at your feet? Unable to sense new movement in your life? Automatically only feeling or thinking or talking about the things you already know?